robert glasper experiment artscience songs

Jazz pianist Robert Glasper and his fusion ensemble make an independent move on ArtScience. After guesting with Snoop Dogg and Brandy and covering Nirvana, Glasper and company wrote, performed, and produced all the tunes here. The opening “This Is Not Fear” blasts out blitzing post-bop improv before settling into a funk groove, showing the band’s mastery of multiple jazz styles. Saxophonist/vocalist Casey Benjamin shines throughout, whether in laid-back R&B environments (“Thinkin Bout You”) or on disco-influenced tracks like “Day to Day.”

September 16, 2016 12 Songs, 1 hour, 10 minutes ℗ 2016 Blue Note Records

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September 19, 2016

For almost a decade, Robert Glasper has been the standard-bearer for jazz music’s fusion with hip-hop, soul, and rock, turning songs like Nirvana ’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Radiohead ’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” into kinetic electro-funk mashups. With his Experiment band, Glasper, vocalist/saxophonist Casey Benjamin, drummer Mark Colenburg, and bassist Derrick Hodge tend to leapfrog different genres, making music that’s rooted in jazz and R&B and impossible to peg. “My people have given the world so many styles of music,” Glasper declares at the top of ArtScience , the Experiment’s new album. “So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.”

ArtScience follows Black Radio 2 , the band’s guest-heavy 2013 LP featuring rappers Common , Snoop Dogg and Lupe Fiasco , and singers Jill Scott and Norah Jones , among many others. On it and the band’s first Black Radio album, the Glasper Experiment mostly stayed in the background, giving room to their guests to shine atop the group’s instrumentals. The formula worked: Black Radio won the 2012 Grammy for Best R&B Album, and “Jesus Children”—a Stevie Wonder remake from Black Radio 2 , featuring vocalist Lalah Hathaway and actor/poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner—won the 2014 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

For ArtScience , the Experiment keeps things in-house, handling all the vocal work themselves. Glasper himself sings lead on “Thinkin Bout You” and Benjamin—the group’s de facto lead vocalist—is front and center on “Day to Day,” “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” and “Hurry Slowly.” ArtScience feels less restrained than the Black Radio series—which, after two releases and a separate remix EP—started to feel safe and redundant. So perhaps for that reason, ArtScience doesn’t play like an R&B or jazz record; it pulls in ’80s funk and ’90s soul without landing any place in particular. For the first time, we get to hear the Experiment let go for a full project, not just on a few songs here and there.

A romantic tone flows through the album, using lyrics that speak to different stages of affection. “Thinkin Bout You” is a sweet ode to puppy love, a reminder that no matter the circumstance, true devotion can withstand long distance and everyday doldrums. Glasper’s voice is washed in bright synths, bolstering the song’s sentimental aura. On “You and Me,” Benjamin recalls a time when he wasn’t so trusting, when his heart was broken and “locked tight.” But in comes a new love, making everything better: “Can’t explain, what you do/How ya do, some kinda mystery.” In years past, the Experiment was more beat-driven; tracks like “Festival” and “Open Mind” emphasized the band’s great instrumental arrangements.

The lyrics aren’t overly intricate, but they offer just enough nuance to let the soundtrack remain the focal point. Songs like “Find You” and “Let’s Fall In Love” strive for mainstream acceptance—the former is a hard-charging bounce beat; the latter uses an Auto-Tuned, trap-infused cadence to perhaps pull in younger fans. ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.

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• Robert Glasper Experiment

ArtScience Tracklist

This is not fear lyrics, thinkin bout you (ft. muhammed ayers) lyrics, day to day lyrics, no one like you lyrics, you and me lyrics, tell me a bedtime story lyrics, find you lyrics, in my mind lyrics, hurry slowly lyrics, written in stone lyrics, let's fall in love lyrics, human lyrics, “artscience” q&a, album credits.

The ArtScience Remixes

Porter Chops Glasper

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All American Music Is Black Music. Robert Glasper Is The Jazz Renaissance Man Tracing Its History.

The prolific musician on the cultural and historical motivations behind his band’s new album, artscience.

Robert Glasper is special. A prolific musician with an endless-seeming well of inspiration and enthusiasm to draw from, he's become known over the past 15 years as a jazz and R&B renaissance man and a go-to producer and collaborator for artists as varied as Bilal and Mac Miller. Over the upward trajectory of his career, Glasper has released multiple albums — both solo and as the leader of two bands — to great acclaim. He's also been widely credited with reintroducing jazz to new audiences, upending static, traditionalist assumptions about the genre, and helping to usher in the current wave of jazz cool that's gripping scenes in Los Angeles and New York . In 2012, for instance, Glasper and his aptly named Robert Glasper Experiment quartet won the Best R&B Performance for Black Radio — a jazz album. “Albums [like Black Radio and Kendrick Lamar 's To Pimp a Butterfly are giving people a license to do their own thing now,” he told The FADER. “It's like, ‘Oh we can do our own thing? And it can get recognition?’”

The Experiment — which features Glasper on piano, Casey Benjamin on saxophone, Derrick Hodge on bass, and Mark Colenburg on drums — is still doing its own thing, coloring outside the lines prescribed by jazz. On September 16, the band will release ArtScience , a freewheeling, genre-agnostic collection of feel-good songs . Unlike previous projects, ArtScience was entirely written, produced, and recorded by the quartet. For two weeks, they hunkered down in a studio in New Orleans; the result is an expansive, textured roller-coaster on which a sax solo sounds at home right next to a Vocoder-processed vocal. “We didn't pay attention to genre at all. I just said, ‘Let's do an album, let's see where it goes. No matter how different the sound of the songs, let's just do it and see how it comes out,’” said Glasper. “Hence the name ArtScience . It was kind of like an experiment: I locked us in somewhere just so we could feed off each other.”

Read Next: Robert Glasper turned Chris Brown’s insult into a sold out T-shirt

When he recently visited our offices, Glasper and I spoke about the inherent blackness of American pop culture, the importance of making music with a message, and finding humanity in the work of legends like Miles Davis. And, ever an in-demand collaborator, he also recounted some of his favorite studio memories.

Collaboration with other artists has been the backbone of your career. What was it about this moment that made you decide to just lock in with your bandmates?

Special guests are awesome and I love them, and, like you said, those albums have catapulted me into different spaces. But at the same time, I have arguably the best band in the world. So I wanted to do something where it showcases us . We don't need to have [other] artists on every album. I wanted to give the world a chance to see what we sound like, the different ways how we sound — how we sound in a jazz way, a pop way, R&B way, hip-hop way, a kind of rock-ish way. I wanted to solidify us as our own thing. It's been about time that we did that, so it was time for this record.

Most bands start out that way, and then the collaborations and the special guests and the other stuff usually comes after.

Exactly. Because I started out that way with my [acoustic jazz trio The Robert Glasper Trio], I had already been around for eight years as myself, before The Experiment. So for me it was like, Special guests? Cool, let's do it! I was ready for that. But then after that caught on like wildfire and we did a part two, then it was like, Well, now I have to do something with this band on our own.

You mentioned the different genres on ArtScience . I was listening to it and I stepped away and for a second I thought that my iTunes went on shuffle.

That's exactly how I thought people were going to react to it. That's exactly the vibe. Some songs are going straight from one thing to a totally different thing and it's like, “It's the same album?” I love that. Man, there's a lot of things in there. I'm trying to blur the lines between the genres. I want them to know like, yes, we're one band playing all of this and it's all live.

Can you tell more about the quote in the first song, “This Is Not Fear” — the one that begins, “The reality is my people have given the world so many styles of music”?

Yeah, that was me speaking. I said, “The reality is my people have given the world so many styles of music, so many different styles of music. So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.” Black people, we built America and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres. That's us. So why do I have to confine myself to just one? Why, if my first album is a jazz record, do I have to stay a jazz musician my whole life? Why do I have to only do jazz records? I’m saying, “No, this is in my blood.” Because rock music is in my blood. Blues, gospel, hip-hop, R&B, the list goes on — it's in me. I feel like it's a slap in my face to my ancestors if I just choose one and roll with that when I clearly have the capability and the talent to do more. Why not do more? I want to explore them all, we want to explore them all. That was the point. [The album] starts off as straight-up jazz, swing, then goes into the hip-hop thing. And then the first real song is trap, kind of, where I'm singing, and I've actually never sung on record before. So going from a trap joint to, like, a disco joint, it’s kind of just, what the hell? In a good way.

What do you hope people take away from that?

I want to remind people that black music is amazing. And there are all forms of it that we've forgotten, you know? Rock music is black music! Don't forget that's what it is. But in general I always try to reflect what's going on in the world at the time when I put an album out. I'm not the type to talk about it a lot, so I try to put it in music. People will play music over and over again, but they won't play a speech over and over again. If it's attached to a song, you'll hear it more. It does something different, it resonates with people different, you know?

I even have my son on an interlude speaking about the police. I didn't even tell him to — he was just angry one day talking. He saw the news, and his mom just happened to tape him without knowing. He's political and passionate like that. So I used it on my album.

Black people, we built America and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres. So why do I have to confine myself to just one?

A lot of those kinds of conversations happen on social media these days. They can be democratizing but also endless and exhausting. What's your relationship with social media like in that sense?

I probably get into a debate [on Twitter], like, maybe once or twice a year when I feel strongly about something. But I do have a platform, I do have fans, and sometimes I'd like my fans to know where I stand on certain things. And I feel like sometimes I should say something. There have been times where I've said some things and the person's like, “Oh, I didn't know that. Oh snap, OK.” And you see people get enlightened because they didn't know something. I love that. But I'm not Talib [Kweli] — every day, every five minutes, he's going in. He's a smart dude, and I'm not politically on it like he is. Sometimes the conversations need to be had on that level without it having to go to commercial.

My last time getting into it with somebody [on Twitter] was because of the police shootings. It's fairly simple, but so many people don't know that no other race has a history with the police like black people. People don't know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back. Overseer, overseer, overseer, officer, officer, officer. That's the origin of the police. So many people don't know that that's what the history is. So once you know that, kind of puts shit into a little bit of perspective for you. You never hear that on Fox or any of these debates on TV. But I sit down on Twitter and people go, “Oh snap, I didn't know that.” And people read up on it. With certain things you're not going to get the whole truth because people just can't — they're on TV and they have a job. But when you're on Twitter, sometimes it all goes off.

You mentioned you have a song coming out with Common, which has a political theme.

Yeah, Common's very good at laying out the history of our people and doing it in a rhyme, really just nailing so many bullet points. So [the song] is basically that. And it's also an uplifting song. So many songs that are like protest songs can be so dark, like there's no hope. But this song, it actually gives you hope. It lets you know what's going on, but it also gives you a lot of hope when you hear it.

Do you think music has a responsibility to do either of those things?

Yes. It's the biggest platform in the world. I don't think there is a bigger platform than music. I feel like artists need to use it. They use it to say all kinds of bullshit so why don’t you use it to say something positive? Music got us here, music plays such a huge part in every aspect of life. Hell, I might have been conceived to some music, you know? It's the most impactful artform. Everybody has a favorite song, but everybody don't have a favorite painting. So if you do have a platform and you can use it for good, why not? All of our heroes did it and that's why we're here.

Speaking of people that came became before, now you’re teaching a class about Miles Davis.

Yeah, I'm teaching at NYU at the Clive Davis school. I'm teaching it with this journalist and scholar Ashley Kahn, so it's me and him. It's really cool — we're going through the life of Miles Davis and the different styles and different genres that he broke through. We're kind of dissecting it as much as we can.

He's obviously someone whose work has been on your mind, as you worked on the [Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead ]. How did being in that zone and focusing on someone else's music make you think about your own work ?

I got a chance to really see how Miles worked with other people, even behind the scenes. When I did the movie, I learned more about Miles than I knew before. Being with his son, his nephew, hanging out with Herbie [Hancock] and Wayne Shorter and all these people that knew Miles very well. But then they asked me to do this [tribute] record called Everything's Beautiful after that. They allowed me to go into the vaults and take multitracks from his actual recording sessions, so I had the chance to hear things from the recording sessions that most people haven't heard: him talking to the musicians, how he gets certain points across, how he gets them to do certain things musically that he wants. You never get a chance to know that Miles had a sense of humor, you know? He's funny! I realized we're the same in a lot of ways. When I heard him saying certain things and doing certain things, I realized, Oh, so I'm on the right track then. I'm on the right path with what I'm doing.

The Robert Glasper Experiment’s ‘ArtScience’ stretches the borders of R&B fusion

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Those searching for a breakout success story in jazz over the last five years would be hard-pressed to top Robert Glasper.

However, for a better read on the trajectory of the Houston-born keyboardist, it may be more instructive to think of “breakout” in terms of what one does to leave a prison. Already a rising star on the strength of albums that could merge an admiration for the beats of J Dilla into a piano trio, Glasper shook up the genre with his band the Experiment and its Grammy-winning 2012 debut “Black Radio,” which rode an open-door policy to the sounds of R&B, rock and hip-hop to something jazz had rarely seen: crossover success with a young audience.

Since then Glasper has guested on various high-profile albums, including Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly,” whose liner notes function as a sort of roll call for a like-minded new generation of genre-blind jazz artists. This year, Glasper was also music supervisor for the Miles Davis biopic “Miles Ahead,” (which yielded a better soundtrack than a movie) along with “Everything Is Beautiful,” a companion album that gave Glasper the keys to the Davis archive to craft surprising new compositions.

Now with “ArtScience,” Glasper’s third album with the Experiment (fourth if you count the 2009 split-CD “Double-Booked”) comes closer to merging the pianist’s love for R&B with the experimentation of his live shows.

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour »

Opener “This Is Not Fear” serves as a band introduction, but Casey Benjamin’s saxophone sprinting around Glasper’s piano also serves notice of the adventures ahead. At nine minutes, “No One Like You” begins with a clicking rhythm and vocoder vocal that gives way to some show-stopping runs on saxophone and piano, and the twitchy lead single “Find You” rides a driving pulse through proggy synthesizer flourishes and a screaming guitar solo with a drive that’s reminiscent of Queen.

Framed by handclaps and disco strings, “Day to Day” is modern cowbell-funk, and with its heartsick vocals and whistled melody, the flinty “Written in Stone” wouldn’t sound out of place on a better Coldplay record.

Free of the vocal cameos of the Experiment’s more pop-oriented 2013 sequel, “Black Radio 2,” “ArtScience” keeps the focus on the composition twists and instrumental fireworks. Though an occasional fondness for quiet storm R&B weighs down tracks like “Let’s Fall in Love” and the Herbie Hancock funk ballad, “Tell Me a Bedtime Story,” there’s plenty here to show Glasper’s Experiment is still driven toward discovery.

The Robert Glasper Experiment

“ArtScience”

(Blue Note)

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Robert Glasper Experiment - ArtScience album review

Classy jazz crossover from the award-laden music maven robert glasper..

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

In his time Grammy-winning Houstonian Glasper has one-upped John Cage, preparing his piano with beer bottles. He’s reinterpreted Miles Davis on his Everything Is Beautiful LP, soundtracked the recent meta-biopic Miles Ahead , and he’s daringly mashed up Radiohead and Herbie Hancock ( Everything In Its Right Place / Maiden Voyage ). After his well-received brace of Black Radio albums, Glasper returns with his crack Experiment – Casey Benjamin (sax, vox), Derrick Hodge (bass) and Mark Colenburg (drums) – to take jazz, blues, soul and electronic music and combine them so elegantly into a set showcasing the unit’s undiluted facility and taste.

Digital and organic instruments work in concert, restless rhythms abound, and complex chord progressions are proffered with a soul man’s panache. Vocoder and autotune are textural tools; more Kid A than bloody Cher ( Thinkin Bout You ; Day To Day ).

The vocal/electro samples on Let’s Fall In Love are nearly conceptual and the deep, ludic sax/piano on No One Like You is deeply transportive. There’s a fusion feel to You And Me , a Steely Dan cadence to the gorgeous In My Mind ; you can imagine Fagen, Corea, Greenwood et al appreciating ArtScience for the bar-setting feat it so clearly is.

A music journalist for over 20 years, Grant writes regularly for titles including Prog, Classic Rock and Total Guitar, and his CV also includes stints as a radio producer/presenter and podcast host. His first book, 'Big Big Train - Between The Lines', is out now through Kingmaker Publishing.

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